The Vacuum Catastrophe | Space Time

Captions provided by CCTubes – Captioning the Internet! If vacuum energy really does have the enormous value predicted by quantum field theory then our gently expanding, geometrically flat universe shouldn’t exist. This is the vacuum catastrophe.

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Let’s talk about vacuum energy from a theoretical standpoint. From the perspective of quantum field theory, every point in space is represented by a quantum oscillator; one for each elementary particle type. Higher energy oscillations represent the presence of real particles. However even the lowest possible energy oscillation – the one corresponding to the absence of particles – has some energy.

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